Brian Brodeur

Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, and So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Poetry Chapbook Award.

Recent poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Many Mountains Moving, Margie, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, River Styx, and online at Verse Daily.

Brian maintains the blog “How a Poem Happens,” an online anthology of over one-hundred interviews with poets. He lives with his wife in Fairfax, VA.

PENDOLINO

Florence to Innsbruck, 1998

We scoot to make room, four strangers
lumped together, and trade stories as we watch
evening break against the man-faced Alps:

Harun from Sarajevo asks in English if
we’ve seen Verona yet, describes the bronze
statue of Juliet whose left breast shines green-gold—

polished over time by tourists’ hands.
Claus laments forgetting to pack linens, confesses
to crabs he contracted at Amsterdam’s Flying Pig,

making Maria, the only girl, squirm in her seat.
Maria asks Harun about the war. He says he wasn’t there,
but his uncle Miljenko, starving, was forced

to slaughter the dog, cut the toughest meat
into strips they grilled on sticks and calledbat wing so his cousins would eat.

During the siege on Hamburg, Claus says, his father’s
family stewed tulip bulbs to survive, once traded
a rancid melon rind for a pair of shoes.

I tell the story dad told me about the Private
outside Dac To, how he crossed into Cambodia
to stalk Viet Cong regulars, taking each man

by the throat, whispering into his ear the name
of a dead friend, and sticking the blade just
under the left shoulder until he felt

the heart through the knife’s hilt stop beating. Soon
we’re all playing this game: whose people
suffered more, passing a bottle of peach schnapps

as we pitch through mountain tunnels, exploding
into fog. In the brightening window, a few Alpine firs
smack the flanks of the train. Our reflections

blur against whitecaps that slowly erase our faces,
and we lean on our packs, trying to stay awake,
as if the night could not go on without us.

NEAR THE FOUNTAIN OF TEARS

carve a momentout of dream stonefor the poet in the Alhambra,over a fountain where the grieving watershall say forever:The crime was in Granada, his Granada.—Machado

The rooms, still dark, were floodedwith blue shadows
when Tripaldi boundthe two bullfighters together.

I chained the lameschoolteacher and the man
with a swollen head—as Alonso called him—who even thanked me

for letting him step on my kneeto climb onto the flatbed.
We drove along a ravineto an empty stretch of hillside

studded with olive trees, unloadedthe prisoners there,
and led them down the mudwhere the slope

leveled. Unsnapping my canteen,I offered it to the man,
who drank and spilled on his shoes.Tripaldi told him he’d seen

a play of his performed in Barcelona.“The one about all those
unhappy women,” Tripaldi said.The man grinned and looked at me.